6. Figuring Mother India

The Case of Nargis

Prologue

In India, the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s have witnessed an extraordinary increase in the (one-way) traffic between the domain of the popular cinema and the domain of national and state-level elective politics. The first celluloid star to translate his star quality into political capital was M. G. Ramachandran (MGR), the hero of more than two hundred and fifty films, mostly in Tamil, and the leader of his own party, the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), which he founded in 1972. Having carefully cultivated an image of himself as a subaltern revolutionary and savior through his films (an image that was to transcend the limitations of his histrionic abilities, which according to most film critics were meager), he became, with the aid of fan clubs that “instantly became his grass-roots political set-up,” ^[1] the wildly popular chief minister of Tamil Nadu in 1977. M. S. S. Pandian has compellingly chronicled the ways in which MGR’s calculated deployment of widely resonant folk idioms served to produce him as a figure who was more a god than an elected official and therefore outside the reach of common kinds of political accountability; this accounts for the fact that he was rarely, in his decade-long tenure as chief minister, blamed by his rural and working-class voters for the repressive and failed policies of his administration.^[2] When he died in 1987, thirty-one of his grieving followers committed suicide, and several shrines appeared in which he was worshipped as a deity.^[3]

In the adjoining state of Andhra Pradesh, the film star N. T. Rama Rao (NTR), who had achieved a dominance in the Telugu cinema comparable to MGR’s in Tamil, was renowned for his portrayals of divine and semidivine characters in the genre of the mythological. (MGR had eschewed playing gods or mythological figures because of the atheist and anti-Brahman ideological plank of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam [DMK], with which he was originally affiliated.)^[4] When he entered state politics in 1982 in quest of the chief ministry, he made his campaign travels in a modern-day chariot that freely evoked his godlike roles on screen. He won the election handily in 1983 under the aegis of his newly formed Telugu Desam party. His ambitions soon assumed a national scale when he called a meeting of all opposition parties in his home state; for some the meeting “pointed to the possibility of a national alternative to Indira Gandhi.” ^[5] But, unlike MGR’s tenure in Tamil Nadu, NTR’s was plagued with scandals and discontent, much of it arising from his impulsive, high-handed, and eccentric behavior. He lost his office in the late 1980s but was returned to power for a brief period in 1994–1995.^[6]

Stars in the Bombay cinema have nurtured and acted upon similar political desires and ambitions. The elections of 1984 saw three of them—Sunil Dutt, Vijayantimala Bali, and Amitabh Bachchan, the “angry young man” superstar of the 1970s and 1980s—elected to the Lok Sabha.^[7] More recently, Rajesh Khanna (the leading man of the 1970s), Shatrughan Sinha (best known for his compelling portrayals of the villain, rather than the hero), and Raj Babbar have contested seats on behalf of the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Samajwadi Party, respectively. None of these figures has enjoyed the astonishing success of an MGR, proving (if proof was needed) that for the Indian electorate, the moral dramas of the film world were (in Farrukh Dhondy’s words) “a public vow, something to live up to,” ^[8] rather than a literal rendition of the “truth” of the star character. In fact, Amitabh’s unparalleled filmic popularity (which transcended in important ways the divisions of region and language) could not save him from the ignominy of the Bofors arms deal, in which he was widely believed to be implicated, along with Rajiv Gandhi, his friend and the prime minister; he soon abandoned politics for the relatively more predictable world of Bombay films. Nonetheless, the fact remains that these stars accumulate a kind of cultural capital in the cinema which seems eminently amenable to that other form of public life that is elective politics. What connects the publicness of the film star with the publicness of politics, elective or otherwise? And what happens to the rendezvous of national politics, broadly defined, and national cinema when its actors are gendered differently, and/or when their religious identities are differently produced?

This chapter can only multiply some of these questions, especially as it seeks to examine a more subterranean, fugitive, and speculative version of the filmic icon than the instances mentioned above. It examines the publicness of the actress Nargis, who was a highly regarded star of the 1940s and 1950s and who, though fascinated by politics and by political figures, never sought elective office herself. In her case, then, there is a caesura between the publicness of the actress and the publicness of the politician; yet the caesura, as one knows, connects as much as it separates. This chapter mimes the operations of the caesura, proceeding through a set of indirections, deferrals, and displacements. It examines the transformation of Nargis into a national icon (signifying Indian womanhood), especially in the context of her highly acclaimed role in Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957), and the way in which this fixes and monumentalizes a notoriously unstable star text.^[9] Indeed, a recent biography of this “First Lady of Indian Cinema” finds no gap between the role she had famously played in Mother India and her real-life persona:

The best actors and actresses are…the embodiment of the characteristics of their own people. In that sense Nargis epitomised the Indian woman in both her strengths and weaknesses, her aspirations, her inherent dignity and her capacity for uncomplaining suffering. Inasmuch as these were deathless virtues, her constituency transcended the frontiers of her time.…What she had achieved in sum was a walk into history. In every way she was Indian womanhood itself. In many ways she was Indian cinema. In some ways she was India.^[10]

In every succeeding sentence, as T. J. S. George stumbles for ways to metaphorize the actress, her representativeness becomes more and more all-encompassing. This chapter ponders the way in which she literalizes the figure of the nation, to such a degree that acting itself becomes impossible after the making of that film.^[11] In taking up this question of the iconicity of the actress, it also takes up perforce the question of Nargis’s elusive but inescapable Muslimness; how does the Other become the icon that represents nationness? A tentative answer takes the form of a story about a phantom; and the story of Nargis, as I see it, is the story of a haunting, a story of the undead Muslimness that is neither present nor absent, not quite there but not quite convincingly buried, either. My story therefore is as much about Nargis dead as it is about Nargis alive and about her afterlife in the current conjuncture of Hindu fundamentalist ascendancy. In taking up the question of who or what bears the burden of Nargis’s Muslimness, this story finds itself to be as much about the son of Mother India as it is about the mother herself. This chapter, then, functions as a brief, speculative analysis of the functions of iconicity and surrogacy in the registers of (Bombay) cinema and politics and of the discursive displacements from one to the other in the figures of Nargis and Sanjay Dutt. It is, if you will, a reading of the reciprocal and uneasy substitutability of two figures who carry considerable symbolic weight in ongoing struggles and anxieties regarding filmic and political representation, and “real” and “simulated” Indianness.

Any analysis of the parallel and sometimes intersecting production of the star biography and the filmic text must take into account the work of Rosie Thomas, who has brilliantly traced the contours of Nargis’s star status, especially in relation to questions of her chastity in her personal life and in her filmic/mythical life as Radha in Mother India.^[12] Pandian’s fine study of MGR the cinematic and political star has likewise helped us understand the commerce between the two domains (cinema and politics). My concern here is with the female star, who raises different questions and occupies a different place from the male star in the symbolic economy of the cinema, and with the star whose connection with politics is metaphorically and discontinuously established even as her enactment of Indian womanhood is literally and almost infallibly realized. Moreover, my concern is with the politics of the nation-state, to which the Bombay cinema bears a special and privileged relation, unlike the Tamil cinema, despite the latter’s numerically larger output.^[13] Finally, and most importantly, I am interested in the ways the gendered star text might be interwoven with another form of identity—the religiopolitical one.

The instance of Nargis’s variable success at being persuasively Indian underscores how persistently questions of religiopolitical identity in postcolonial India continue to be coded through the tropes of originality and impersonation, ownership and expropriation, depths and surfaces. This is particularly the case when questions of Muslim Indian identity are at stake. It is a commonplace that in the Hindu imaginary of the Indian nation, the Muslim carries a double and conflicting valence in relation to questions of indigeneity and authenticity. He (and this figure is usually though not invariably imagined as male) is the alien invader, destructive of properly Indian (read “Hindu”) institutions, religious monuments, and ways of life; his loyalties are directed elsewhere, and he aggressively insists on his separateness from—but nonetheless within—an Indian and Hindu imagined community. Even when he appears to have renounced a Muslim identity politics and to have embraced the (Hindu) ethic of assimilation, he is not entirely to be trusted, his essential Muslimness being irreducible and apt to surface at any point. At the same time, though, that his religious Otherness is seen as essential, his profession of an authentic difference is spurious, since his Muslimness is the result of a (sometime) conversion. He is thus really a Hindu, albeit a lapsed, treacherous, or unwilling one, and he can be compelled by the Hinduness from which he has been forcibly wrenched. Hence, modern Hindu endeavors at conversion of Muslim or Christian Indians is named not as conversion but as purification, shuddhi; it is a purging and a return to what one always was but had momentarily forgotten.

In their suturing of origin and legitimacy, both accounts—which reinforce rather than undo each other—stage Muslim Indian identity not only as a problem but also as a problem of (an always dubious) impersonation. It is upon this uncertain ground that one must locate the life and afterlife of the assimilated Muslim actress. What makes her the obvious choice for the ideologically freighted figure of (a Hindu) Mother India? In what ways is her filmic and personal exemplification of good Hinduness/good Indianness/good femininity both exceptional and counterfeit? How are we to read the process by which Sanjay Dutt becomes Nargis, and becomes Muslim, in the current moment? These are some of the questions to which this chapter on Muslim impersonation will address itself.

Nargis: The Life

At the time of the release in 1957 of Mother India, which was the film with which she was conclusively associated from then on, Nargis was among the most prominent figures of the Indian cinema; the facts of her biography are now legend, but they do need to be rehearsed briefly. Nargis’s mother, Jaddanbai, was by birth a kothewali (professional singer and performer/courtesan), well known in Allahabad and Calcutta as a specialist in the musical form known as thumri. She had, according to her daughter’s biographer,^[14] married at seventeen and become the mother of two sons; nothing is known of this first partner or indeed of how formalized such a domestic arrangement might have been. In any event, when in 1928 a wealthy young medical student named Mohanbabu proposed to convert to Islam (thus becoming Abdul Rashid) to marry her, she consented. Nargis was born the following year. (It may be of interest to note the demand that the respectable and wealthy medical student convert for the sake of the [already married] courtesan, a demand that Nargis, at the height of her career, was unable or unwilling to make of Raj Kapoor or Sunil Dutt.) Jaddanbai moved to Bombay in the mid-1930s, having by this time established herself as a film producer, music director, and actress (this being the era predating the ascendancy of the playback singer, an era in which roles were assigned according to vocal talent). She was soon to become a Bombay institution, attracting many of the leading figures of the film world to her home and to the studio where she worked. Though Nargis appeared as a child actress in Talash-e-Haq (1935), she was carefully educated, and her access to the world of films was strictly controlled. She was a student at St. Mary’s, an elite girls’ school in Bombay, and was to entertain hopes of training as a doctor, an ambition that her own father, Mohanbabu, had abandoned in order to marry Jaddanbai. She was with difficulty persuaded by her mother and her mother’s friend, the director Mehboob Khan, to perform her first “adult” role at fourteen in the latter’s Taqdeer (1943). All such scruples were set aside after the success of Taqdeer, though the young Nargis is said to have faced some degree of social ostracism from the families of her more respectable, non-filmi classmates.^[15] While Nargis’s rapid change of heart is all too easily attributable to her great youth, coupled with the glamour of the industry in which she found herself, the sense of isolation and degradation that accompanies the glamour and responsibility is not without interest. Certainly Nargis’s feeling that the decision to be an actress was one from which there was no going back (“Quite rapidly she realised that life would never be the same again for her or her family. Nothing more was heard about Mehboob’s promise to leave her to her studies or indeed about the planned studies”)^[16] is coded in terms analogous to those attendant upon a narrative of the loss of sexual innocence. Rosie Thomas’s report of the Nargis mythology conforms more unambiguously to such a trajectory: “Once she reached adolescence, however, Nargis’s mother not only tricked her into (most unwillingly) starring in a film for her friend Mehboob Khan but also allegedly put her daughter’s nath (virginity) on the market and allowed a wealthy Muslim prince to pay handsomely for her. This episode is sometimes denied, or recounted as her first affair. Its purpose seems to be to construct as already tarnished before meeting Raj Kapoor.” ^[17] Nargis never quite lost the sense of being less than fully respectable that such an ancestry and such a career implied, and she always cherished as a utopian possibility the dream of becoming a doctor. She appeared in several more films in the 1940s, achieving star status by the time she was approached by a then comparatively unknown Raj Kapoor, to play opposite him in his first production, Aag (1948). After a number of hits, which featured her opposite some of the best-known leading men of the day, especially Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar, she became one of the most important luminaries of the newly emerging star system in Bombay cinema; she was routinely billed above her male leads, and, for some years in the 1950s, she commanded higher fees than any of them did. The international success of some of the films (Awaara, 1951; Shri 420, 1954) that she had made with her lover, Raj Kapoor—which were runaway hits in the Soviet Union, West Asia, and North Africa—added another kind of nuance to her star image, as she became, in these post-Independence years, the ambassador of “Indian culture” on a world stage.

Nargis achieved a significant measure of star power in the years between the late 1940s and mid-1950s, not only because of her histrionic virtuosity (which was considerable) but also because of her very public romance with the rising male star Raj Kapoor. While it is true that Nargis was, as a review of a book on Raj Kapoor’s films unequivocally states, central to the making of Raj Kapoor himself as an actor and a director and of RK Studios^[18] (she worked at minimal wages for the studio and, in a partial throwback to the early days of the studio system, acted in non-RK films only at the pleasure of her lover), it was also true that her association with Raj helped invest her fully with star status. He had begun to pursue her very early in their association, and by the time they acted together in Andaaz and Barsaat (both 1949), they were already an item. Raj Kapoor was married and a father, in addition to being a Hindu. Their love affair was conducted without any particular subterfuge; and since they were young, glamorous, and successful, and from all accounts passionately in love with each other, they were envied as well as reproached. As her biographer admits, “It was her appearance with Raj Kapoor that thrilled audiences. Their romance had an appeal that nothing else could rival.” ^[19] The love scenes in Barsaat in particular were marked by an intensity hitherto unseen in the Bombay cinema. Critics have pointed to the unorthodox camera work and sound effects in the love scenes, with their lingering close-ups and a low-decibel pitch that intimates intimacy.^[20]

The star biography took another significant turn in the mid-1950s, when Nargis realized that Raj Kapoor would not marry her, that is, he would not make her his second wife; he began instead to demonstrate a marked romantic interest in other actresses. Besides, it was becoming clear to her that her that her near-exclusive association with RK Studios was keeping her from important roles (such as that of Anarkali in K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam, for which she had been chosen); some of her most highly regarded performances (though not necessarily the ones that brought her stardom)—in Andaaz, Anhonee, Jogan, and Mother India—were performed outside RK Studios, which had a fairly limited vision of the female lead’s role in a film.^[21] She had once complained to screenwriter K. A. Abbas about the triviality of her role in the wildly successful Awaara, insisting that he create for her a more substantial role in Anhonee, produced under the Naya Sansar banner.^[22] Accordingly, she let Mehboob (who had “discovered” her and who had always begrudged Raj Kapoor his powerful claims on her) know that she was available for Mother India. A remake of Mehboob’s 1940 classic, Aurat (Woman), Mother India was more self-consciously epic and nationalist. It was designed (among other things) to function as an implicit rebuttal of Katherine Mayo’s notorious book of 1927 that had detailed the pathological sexual practices of Hindu males.^[23]

The film was three years in the making, involving enormous resources and the paid and unpaid labor of thousands of people. When it was released in 1957, it was successful on a scale unprecedented in Bombay cinema. It ran for fifty weeks in Bombay, breaking all box-office records, and was granted tax-exempt status in the Bombay province; it was the first Indian film to be nominated for an Oscar (in the foreign-film category), and it won Nargis the Filmfare Award for 1957 as well as the Best Actress award at the Karlovy Vary film festival.^[24] The role of Radha in Mother India was the one that irrevocably defined Nargis for the Indian cinema-going public as well as for the history of Indian film, not simply because of its epic scope and her own brilliance in it, but also because it effectively marked her departure—at the height of her career—from Bombay cinema. Several other films, on which she had been working concurrently with Mother India, were released in 1957–1958, though she bowed out of her acting career once Mehboob Khan’s epic was completed. She was to appear in the movies only once after this, in Raat aur Din [Night and Day, 1967], in order to help her producer brothers out of a severe financial crisis.^[25]

The fascination of the film was augmented by a behind-the-scenes story of its making, a story that was to constitute an epic narrative in itself. It is said that during the famous fire scene in the film, Nargis was trapped behind some burning haystacks and was rescued at considerable personal risk by the relatively unknown young actor Sunil Dutt, who played her wayward son Birjoo in the film. This is one of the stories most often repeated about Nargis, satisfying every expectation about life imitating art. “Mother” and “son” fell in love and were married quietly in March 1958, at which point Nargis retired from her acting career. Marriage is said to have been her salvation; said one of her costars, K. N. Singh, “With marriage it was like she had reached home. She thought God had come to earth in the form of Sunil Dutt. So much did she worship him.” ^[26] She became an exemplary wife and the devoted mother of three children, especially of her son Sanjay. She also dedicated herself to a number of charitable causes, including that of spastic children. She led an active life, working for her husband’s film-production company, participating in government-sponsored delegations to foreign countries, and serving briefly as a member of the Rajya Sabha, to which she was nominated by her friend Indira Gandhi. During these years she was made unhappy by the delinquency and drug addiction of her much-pampered son and by her husband’s criticism of her overindulgence of Sanjay. In 1980 a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer took her to New York for treatment; she died in Bombay in 1981, a month before her fifty-second birthday.

Before we read the intertextuality of the epic film and the epic life, we need to speak briefly of the film itself. Mother India, which is said to have played continually in one part or another of the country since its release, is one of the great classics of the Bombay cinema. It is the story of the trials of the peasant woman Radha, who spends her life battling the malign forces of nature and humanity and who assumes the mythic stature of the matriarch by the film’s end. A devoted wife and the mother of four boys, she toils heroically at home and in the fields, enduring poverty and the rapacious extortions of the village moneylender, Sukhilala. Her husband loses his arms in an accident and forsakes his home, unable to bear the shame of his dependence on her. After floods have killed two of her sons and devastated her home and her harvest, the moneylender proposes to feed her children in exchange for making her his mistress. Sorely tempted though she is, she prizes her laaj (chastity) above all else and manages to rebuild her life. She raises her sons on her own and becomes “the mother of the whole village,” keeping the villagers from fleeing their home after the floods. As she sings to them, in the name of Mother Earth, a map of pre-Partition India forms on the screen. In the second part of the film, Radha is older, her sons grown. Her older son, Ramu, is domestic and law abiding; her younger and rebellious son, Birjoo, is passionately devoted to her, a devotion that is intimately bound up in his keen sense of the wrongs done to her and to the village by Sukhilala. Becoming a bandit, he kills Sukhilala and attempts to abduct the moneylender’s daughter in an attempt to counter the insult offered earlier to his mother’s honor; but his mother, who regards the chastity of the village women as her own, kills him rather than letting him bring disgrace to the village.

In retrospect, Nargis’s decision to play the role of the heroine in Mother India seems to be charged with extraordinary symbolic import. Not only did it signal her break with her erstwhile lover, it also meant a markedly differently role from the ones that she had been used to playing. She typically played the glamorous Indian woman whose modernity coexisted with her rhapsodic submission to a whole ensemble of “Indian” values.^[27] This gendered drama of the overthrow of western cultural values through an elaborately reinflected Indian tradition was (and is) a staple of the Bombay cinema, allowing for a staging of the differential seductions of both modernity and tradition. The role of Radha, on the other hand, was entirely without any such obvious glamour, requiring her to play a poor peasant woman (an extraordinary demand for a glamorous star, especially before the advent of the so-called parallel cinema) and to age more than twenty years in the course of the film.

Tales of Nargis’s professionalism and her strong identification with the role are legendary. She (at least in her recall of it) saw this as a dream role, in which she could play the paragon, the identificatory ideal of the Indian woman. P. K. Nair recalled with what relish she deglamourized herself for the role and the way she “completely transformed herself into the ‘Kali’ image of the ‘Mother.’” ^[28] Even the notoriously acerbic film critic Baburao Patel was moved to exclaim: “Remove Nargis and there is no Mother India. Nargis is both the body and soul of the picture.…Nargis lives the role better than Radha could have lived it.” ^[29] It is instructive to read her description of her experience of the film, especially the horrific scene of the burning haystacks, which she chose to do herself instead of entrusting it, as was expected, to a double:

Preparations were being made for the fire sequence in Mother India. Nargis, made up to look like an old woman, was talking…of death and saying how much her hands, with the make-up on them, resembled her mother’s hands.…She ran in, to embrace the flames. The flames responded willingly. They embraced her and planted burning kisses on her weary but determined brow.

It was soon over. Nargis was rescued. She had sustained burns. But, in the flames, she had at last found the Truth she had been searching for, the Truth which freed her. The old Nargis died in those flames.^[30]

The filming, and especially the trial by fire which was fortuitously authenticated by real-life occurrences, is explicitly coded as transformative of the “life” and as the repository of a certain truth. What is perhaps more curious for me is the monumentalizing and distancing effect of the use of the third person. Nargis seems quite aware of herself as legend, larger than life; but in a moment of simultaneous subjective splitting and incorporation, she is also curiously positioned as the obituarist of an older, legendary self. She dies to the old forms of existence, in order to achieve a certain transcendence and entry into a new legendary status; and death alone provides the condition of possibility for such transcendence.

Part of the fascination of the film for Indian audiences is of course the iconicity of various constitutive moments: the trial by fire and the rescue, the prestige of motherhood, and the attainment of mythic status. This was to prove, for Nargis, literally the role to end all roles. Given the mythic quality of the role, and given the mythic status she had herself attained because of its publicity and its wide circulation and popularity, it seemed that she had effectively made herself unfit for ordinary roles. Only marriage and motherhood in “real life” could provide a script that matched the epic quality of the film. And while it is true that the female star’s renunciation of films for marriage is the norm rather than the exception in the popular Hindi cinema and is routinely attended by the inflated rhetoric of the felicities of matrimony and motherhood, there is a way in which Nargis’s preparation for that last, most exalted role had been distinctively, indeed uniquely heralded, by her own professional trajectory. It is precisely her renunciation—which seemed so great and so apposite at the same time—that allowed someone like K. N. Singh to rate her wifehood as the culmination of a brilliant acting career: “I think her greatest achievement was getting a husband like Sunil. Twenty-two years of married life were her happiest years.” ^[31]

Nargis: The Star

Nargis was to remain a legend long after her exit from the screen, and any analysis of her enduring image must come to terms with the status of the star in Bombay cinema, which is, generally speaking, greater than anything that obtains in Hollywood. As Behroze Gandhy and Rosie Thomas point out in their essay on stardom in Hindi cinema, “The parallels between Indian stars and the gods of the Hindu pantheon are frequently remarked upon> both are colourfully larger than life, their lives and loves, including moral lapses, the subject of voyeuristic fascination and extraordinary tolerance, and stars accept, on the whole graciously, an adoration close to veneration.” ^[32] Furthermore, “it [is] firmly believed that stars are a crucial ingredient in the success of any mainstream Indian film.” ^[33] This is in large part, and in the current conjuncture, more true of male stars than of female ones, who have (since the 1960s) come to have increasingly subordinate roles in relation to the male lead.

The star system in Bombay cinema is not, of course, an indigenous phenomenon, and it cannot be understood outside the context of Hollywood cinema, which was immensely popular in the subcontinent for the first four decades of the century, until the “talkies” had effectively displaced the silent film. Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy tell that us that in 1926–1927 “15 percent of the features released in India were Indian, 85 percent were foreign. Most of these were American.” ^[34] (It is said that it was the advent of the talkies that effectively “nationalized” Indian cinema.)^[35] Douglas Fairbanks, Eddie Polo, and Charlie Chaplin (the last of whom Raj Kapoor was to imitate in the 1950s with considerable aplomb) enjoyed considerable popularity among Indian audiences,^[36] and Indian stars of the silent screen and the talkies such as Master Vithal, Fearless Nadia, Devika Rani, and Prithviraj Kapoor had considerable drawing power. But in the 1920s and 1930s production was organized for the most part around studios which operated much like extended families, with their own laboratories, recreational facilities, and canteens, the “star” being “an employee…not the pivot of planning and…not in control.” ^[37] The modern-day star system, which was the product of freelancing, began to emerge only in the 1940s, when independent producers, made wealthy by war profiteering and illegal arms trafficking, drew stars away from studios by bidding up their price. This was to lead eventually to the recasting of mainstream commercial cinema as “the cinema of the star rather than the cinema of the director, or the studio”;^[38] stars were signed up even before decisions about script or direction were made.

The star system has been almost from the first overwhelmingly male dominated, female stars usually commanding (as in Hollywood) smaller fees and enjoying relatively brief careers as romantic leads. This is easily explicable in light of the industry’s rampant sexism, which can only imagine a short shelf life for the female lead. But it is also due in part to the fact that the female star’s marriage has traditionally been considered incompatible with the pursuit of an acting career; it is fairly safe to generalize that, with a few notable exceptions (mainly actresses associated with the New Wave cinema), the female star’s career is automatically extinguished upon marriage. That this is still taken as a given, even among film figures generally considered “progressive” (the director Gulzar, for example)^[39] speaks to the fraught history of the actress in the Indian film industry. In the early years of the industry, few respectable women from the Hindu or Muslim communities were willing to risk the loss of modesty that association with the performing arts, including cinema, implied. Even prostitutes, it is said, spurned the offers of filmmakers;^[40]Rajah Harishchandra (1913), one of the first Indian feature films, featured a young man in the female lead, as did several other films of that decade. The early female stars, such as Sulochana (Ruby Myers), Sita Devi (Renee Smith), and Patience Cooper, were Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) women, whose liminal status allowed them relatively easy entry into the disreputable world of the cinema. Some of the early actresses of the Indian screen also had associations with the world of the tawa’if (courtesan, usually Muslim), especially because of their training in vocal music and dance. Since the Indian talkie distinguished itself from the start with its exclusive reliance on songs and dance (Alam Ara [1931], the first of these, was to advertise itself as an “all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing” feature), and since playback singers did not make their advent until the 1940s, the industry found itself drawing upon a class of women trained in performance practices which had traditionally formed a continuum with sexual services.^[41] Over the years the industry did manage to attract women of higher social standing (the Maharashtrian Brahman Durga Khote being one of the earliest of them), but the female star’s status has continued to be a morally ambiguous one, not only because she has functioned as a sex symbol but also because she has simultaneously had to carry an elevated moral charge. Actors and actresses are perhaps the only public figures whose erotic lives are the object of intense, widespread, and institutionalized curiosity (there is no inquisitiveness of corresponding scale about the sex lives of female or male politicians, though the real and alleged romantic involvements of Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Feroze Gandhi have certainly been much discussed). The industry of course shares fully this public ambivalence about its own sexual (mis)deeds, especially as it pertains to women. Nargis herself is said to have worked strenuously to keep her nieces and nephews out of the orbit of Bombay cinema. In the case of her own son Sanjay, she was eager to see him become a doctor but became reconciled to his strong desire to be an actor. In the case of her daughters, she believed that the era of the serious actress had passed: “I feel there is no future for an actress except to make a lot of money for a certain number of years,” ^[42] though she also confessed to envying contemporary actresses some of the interesting roles they had played. Raj Kapoor, whose family was easily the first family of the Bombay cinema (his father, brothers, and sons have all been affiliated with the industry in one capacity or another), was less ambiguous, and he is said to have forbidden the involvement of any of the “Kapoor women” in the dirty business. In this context, his infamous comment about wives and actresses is certainly apropos: “My wife is not to be my actress and my actress is not to be my wife.” ^[43]

Where male actors have (unlike Raj Kapoor), actually married actresses, it has almost invariably been with the stipulation that the wedding coincide with professional retirement. It speaks to the profoundly liminal status of the female star that she has so often occupied (or wished to occupy) the (distinctly secondary and officially illegal) position of the “second wife”; this includes some of the best-known actresses of the dominant and the parallel cinemas. It may speak to why these actresses are anxious to erect a cordon sanitaire between their status as lawfully wedded wives and their status as (mere) actresses. Nargis, for one, was anxious about the possibility of a respectable marriage, asking (in the context of a possible marriage with Sunil Dutt) only half-playfully, “Who will marry the daughter of a singing woman?” ^[44] His offer of marriage may help in part to explain (what was commonly regarded as) her devotion and her gratitude to her relatively obscure and far less talented actor-husband.

Nargis: The Sequel

The Bombay film industry has been, and continues to be, intertwined uneasily but closely with the gendered and religiously inflected discourse of nationalism and the nation-state; it is continually anxious to establish its legitimacy in the eyes of a state that looks upon it with suspicion as “both paltry and powerful.” ^[45] Nargis was thus doubly liminal as an actress and as a Muslim subject; both identities involved complex negotiations not only within the postcolonial state but also within an industry whose inaugural moment was ineluctably tied to an emergent idiom of cultural nationalism.^[46] We might remember that Dadasaheb Phalke’s inspiration for Rajah Harishchandra was famously prompted by the desire for a mimesis that involved a specifically Indian address:

In 1910 I happened to see the film The Life of Christ in the America-India Picture Palace in Bombay.…That day also marked the foundation in India of an industry which occupied the fifth place in the myriads of big and small professions that exist.…While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes I was mentally visualising the Gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya. I was gripped by a strange spell. I bought another ticket and saw the film again. This time I felt my imagination taking shape on the screen. Could this really happen? Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?…There was no doubt whatsoever about the utility of the profession and its importance as an industry.…This was the period of the Swadeshi movement and there was profuse talking and lecturing on the subject. For me personally, this led to the resignation of my comfortable government job and taking to an independent profession.^[47]

As Somnath Zutshi points out, the mapping of an upper-caste (and northern Indian) Hindu masculine identity onto the space designated the national happens as a matter of course; in this context, Phalke’s association with Tilak and with his (Hindu) nationalist magazine Kesari comes as no surprise.^[48] But what is also worthy of note is the way in which the terrain of the cinema was claimed from the first as the ground upon which the struggle for an Indian nation would be waged: “A whole technology, to say nothing of a major culture industry, could now designate itself as Swadeshi [indigenously Indian].” ^[49] The pre-Independence history of the Bombay cinema is replete with instances of films provoking the wrath of British censors because of their incorporation of (Congress) nationalist icons like spinning wheels, Indian flags, and portraits of leaders such as Gandhi or Nehru, or their rendition of scenes of mutiny, or songs or “dialogues” that could be construed as anticolonial. (Theodore Baskaran has persuasively demonstrated the extent to which South Indian, primarily Tamil, cinema was also invested in nationalist topoi and affiliated with prominent nationalists like Rajaji in the decades preceding Independence.)^[50] In fact, the Bombay industry would claim on more than one occasion to have functioned as a de facto arm of state in generating through affect and consent a national unity in diversity that the postcolonial state had been markedly unsuccessful at achieving through its own institutions.

However, Congress nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s and, indeed, of the post-Independence decades could not but be haunted by the specter of its other, Muslim nationalism and, by sympathetic identification, the figure of the Muslim herself/himself as the sign of that intimate enemy. Faisal Devji’s analysis of the Muslim in the symbolic economy of the Indian nation-state, while implicitly invoking a male subject, obviously has its resonances for pre-Independence Congress nationalism as well as for the Bombay cinema that is locked in an embrace with it: “In the history that the Indian state obsessively re-enacts, the Muslim separatist is nothing more than the original sign of its failure. The Muslim, in other words, represents a fundamental anxiety of nationalism itself: of the nation as something unachieved.” ^[51] This anxiety is most obviously managed in the cinema through a structure of prohibitions and repressions; the industry functioned then (as it still does) under the constraints of censorship protocols which proscribed the representation of subjects that might tend to inflame “communal passions,” a proscription that ensured that “communal passions” or Muslim religiopolitical identities except of an oppressively benevolent variety remained unnamed and unexaminable. (We might remember that M. S. Sathyu’s Garm Hawa [1973] was banned before it went on to win a special award for promoting national integration.) At the same time, as the source of profound psychic anxiety for the (new) nation, Muslimness also had to be exorcised again and again. One common vehicle for the enactment of such exorcisms was the historical film; Sumita Chakravarty is surely right in underscoring the ways in which the Bombay cinema has “not so much addressed the Hindu-Muslim relationship as sublimated it by displacing it onto the canvas of history.…The historical film has been the privileged site of elaboration of the Muslim sensibility.” ^[52] But that this sublimation was only a partial one is evidenced by the ideology of religious identity that informs such “Muslim historicals” (many of which were made by Muslim directors) as Mehboob’s Humayun (1945, starring Nargis, Veena, Ashok Kumar, and Chandramohan) and K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960, starring Dilip Kumar, Madhubala, and Prithviraj Kapoor). Humayun represents Babar, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India, as fervently devoted to the mutual love of his Hindu and Muslim subjects and as a king who accepts a Rajput Hindu princess as his adopted daughter. Given the potency of the myth of the sexually aggressive Muslim male and the violated Hindu woman, it is not surprising that Mehboob cast the Hindu woman as a daughter (rather than a wife), and a spirited one at that; there is, however, a considerable if unspoken erotic charge that binds the princess, the prince Humayun (her adopted brother), and her Hindu lover.^[53] The film, despite its high production values and fine performances by many of its stars, was panned by a range of critics for its historical “inaccuracies” and for its alleged soft-pedaling of Muslim “tyranny” over Hindus. Mehboob was never to make a like film again. K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam was safer in its choice of Akbar, the Mughal ruler most assimilated to a Hindu nationalist sensibility, but it, too, was careful to represent him as religiously eclectic, celebrating Hindu festivals, and utterly dedicated to a polity always already marked as Indian and literalized by the map of a pre-Partition India at the beginning of the film.

If this is what the films give us, what kinds of evidence might be adduced by what we will call the “life”? There, one looks almost in vain for those places where Nargis’s Muslimness might be manifest. If there is one thing that characterizes such a figure, it is what might be deemed her “cosmopolitanism,” a cosmopolitanism that overwrites the possibility of a Muslim difference and is aligned not only with that of the emerging Indian nation-state and its commitment to a secular modernity so-called but also with a specifically filmic variety of religious marking and unmarking. Unlike a figure like Mehboob, who was famous for the regularity of his prayers and who might be said to have simultaneously showcased his Muslim difference and made repeated and hysterical efforts to establish his good Indianness, she was not overtly religious. Her background in fact marked her out as the interstitial figure representative of a new Indian modernity. Though her mother was a Muslim and her father had officially converted in order to marry her, his conversion is usually treated both as a matter of form and a sign of his magnanimity, as meaningless in one register but meaningful in another.

Nargis entered acting and adulthood at a time when religious identities were being monumentally and violently reconstellated. It is likely that she suffered the impact of this, as did most other Muslims in pre- and post-Partition India. Partition also had its special set of implications for popular Hindi cinema. While it undoubtedly was solidly anchored in Bombay, it had always maintained a commerce with the Punjab (especially Lahore) and Bengal, both of which were torn asunder by the new national configurations. Several people, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh, crossed new and impermeable borders in 1947; stars like Noorjehan and Khurshid left for Pakistan, while Hindu and Sikh counterparts went to India. K. A. Abbas’s autobiography provides an account of the traumas of those Muslims who never left India; Nargis’s biographer says more tersely: “Leading Muslim personalities in Bombay were momentarily alarmed and were looked upon by some with suspicion.” ^[54] An advertisement was to appear in the Times of India in late 1946 under her name, at the time of particularly vicious anti-Muslim riots, pleading for peace: “Nargis awaits the return of peace—with the rest of the city.” ^[55] This understatement seems to be the mode in which an identity never overtly acknowledged as religious can be articulated.

As an actress, Nargis was noted for having moved away, after the commencement of her involvement with Raj Kapoor, from “the Muslim crowd” (including Mehboob), though she made several films with Raj Kapoor’s rival, Dilip Kumar. When involved with Raj Kapoor (and hopeful of being his second wife), she routinely wore the sindoor of the Hindu wife, and it is possible that the relationship may have helped detach her from the signifiers of Muslim identity. When she married the Hindu Sunil Dutt, it was in an Arya Samaj (reformist/revivalist Hindu) ceremony; their children were given Hindu names.

What is one to make of such unmarking, which while voluntary is rarely neutral? I do not wish of course to assert that Muslim identity is something conceived or experienced in the same way by all subjects designated as Muslim nor to accuse Nargis of having abandoned an authentic Muslim identity; but I do wish to speak of this identity (especially the identity of the “good Muslim Indian”) as a persistent, insuperable, and continually negotiated problem. Paola Bacchetta has cogently described the varying place of the Muslim woman in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) fantasies about its own masculine heterosexuality; what is particularly fascinating is her account of the way the Muslim woman often figures as the subject of a (usually unreciprocated) desire for the Hindu nationalist male.^[56] Nargis’s devotion can fruitfully be read through such a lens, which may serve as a grid even for those who are not overtly Hindu nationalists, for Hindu nationalist thought, rather than necessarily contradicting the commonsense of the modern Hindu subject, represents it in radical form. Her legendary status is secured and her transcendence of her Muslimness confirmed through her desire for and devotion to a Hindu male savior. She can atone both for her Muslimness and for her enticement of a married Hindu male by living the Mother India allegory, which not only scripts her as heroically chaste but also—in the extraordinary scene showing an undivided continent reforming in response to her summons to the villagers to return—as a renouncer of Muslim separatism. Rosie Thomas has brilliantly described the appeal of Mother India to Indian audiences in terms of the gossip attaching to the sexual histories of its stars. I wonder whether part of the appeal is not also due to the very fact of Nargis’s Muslimness, this Muslimness functioning as an asset rather than a blot upon her status as ideal Indian woman, precisely because it can be shown to be erasing or overwriting itself in the assumption of the Radha role. If Mother India is, at least partially, an allegory of the repudiation of Muslim difference and of a becoming Hindu, then only a Muslim can assume the iconic position of that maternal figure.

What interests me here is precisely this recessive, displaced quality of the Muslimness in the star persona and, indeed, in the filmography itself: Nargis—unlike her female Muslim compatriots Madhubala and Meena Kumari, for instance—did not appear in any major “Muslim” role.^[57] I am interested in the (absent, ephemeral, discreet) Muslimness of the actress and in the ways in which this barely articulated religious identity might provide a point of entry into questions of Muslim femininity and Indian nationalism. How is Muslim woman represented in the (filmic) space of the nation? Where can one find it, if it is not only or most satisfactorily locatable in Muslim characters and stereotypes or in directors, songwriters, and producers? (The Bombay film industry is well known for the considerable Muslim talent it has attracted.) As Mukul Kesavan confirms, such cataloguing is inadequate to “[encompass] the singular relationship between Hindi films and Muslim-ness.…When I speak of Muslim-ness…and the Hindi cinema, the reference is not only or even mainly to its Muslim personnel nor to its repertoire of ghetto stereotypes, but to a cultural influence that has determined the very nature of this cinema.” ^[58] Kesavan discerningly goes on to locate Muslimness in a nonpersonalized and nontaxonomizing sphere; he locates it in the very grammar (an Urdu, usually demotic but sometimes high-flown, and distinct from the Sanskritized, shuddh [pure] Hindi of All-India Radio) of Bombay cinema. I am, however, more interested in the traffic between star text and religious identity, in the repressions and displacements of Muslimness to the limits of the biography; I am interested, too, in the displacements that are necessitated by Bombay cinema’s exhibition of its own “cosmopolitanism,” a cosmopolitanism that is made deeply anxious by that sense of the abjected, the supplementary, that is Muslimness in Indian identity.

As we have seen, Nargis’s Muslimness seems not to emerge in any obvious way from the legend of her life, which seems to involve if anything a disidentification from the Muslim, tawa’if world of her mother. Her own publicly stated loyalties were powerfully, even hysterically, (Congress) nationalist and statist. At the first Film Seminar organized in 1955 by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, she insisted, far more vehemently than did any of the other participants from the film industry, on the role of cinema as the handmaiden of nation building: “In the new pattern of socialistic society laid down for our country, the emphasis will naturally be on rapid industrial progress, and India will need hundreds of thousands of working heroes and heroines to achieve the goal. The film artistes are duty-bound to portray them on the screen. Today, the film artistes are called upon to play more dynamic roles reflecting the spirit of ‘new’ India.” ^[59] At a later date, and more notoriously, she became embroiled in controversy when, in her opening remarks as a newly appointed member of the Rajya Sabha, she attacked the films of Satyajit Ray as catering to a western taste for Indian poverty: “Why do you think films like Pather Panchali become so popular abroad?…People there want to see India in an abject condition. That is the image they have of our country and a film that confirms that image seems to them authentic.…His [Ray’s] films are not commercially successful. They only win awards.…What I want is that if Mr. Ray projects Indian poverty abroad, he should also show ‘Modern India.’” ^[60] If she sought an identification with any political figure, it was with Indira Gandhi (a personal friend, as her father Nehru had been, though to a less intense degree), whose representation as Durga or as Bharat Mata resonated powerfully with her most important role and her own sense of moral authority. (Several people—most notably Rajeswari Sunder Rajan—have in fact noted the parallels across the lives of Indira and Nargis and the reverberations of both in the script of Mother India—the mythic status, the imperiousness, and the devotion to an ungovernable son.)^[61]

Where Nargis’s Muslimness becomes most visible is in what persists as an afterlife and what refuses to stay buried. One important instance of this is the controversy that erupted immediately after her death, as if the mortality of the legend was what permitted a release of the disavowals that the fetishization of Mother India had reined in. Newspaper headlines marked her death as the passing of a legend: “Nargis: So Ends the Legend,” “Last Journey of a Queen,” “End of an Era.” And yet there was something else, an appendage, an excess that seems always to haunt the figure of the “good Indian Muslim.” According to Sunil Dutt, when she died he decided, for sentimental reasons (having to do with her remembrance of her parents in the last months of her life), to give her a Muslim burial rather than a Hindu cremation. There was free public speculation about this; given that Nargis had demonstrated her transcendence of her Muslimness through her films and the example of her life, her return to Islam, even in death, was deeply disturbing, raising questions about the genuineness of her (simulation of) non-Muslimness. If I may borrow a term from queer theory and queer activism, I would describe this as analogous to the outing of public figures at the time of their death; one is reminded inescapably of the trauma to heterosexual identity by the revelation of Rock Hudson’s gayness when he was dying from AIDS.^[62] In the case of Nargis, some reports claimed that she had left instructions to be buried as a Muslim, others that her brother (with the aid of aggressive Muslim mullahs) had insisted on Muslim rites in defiance of the widower’s wishes.^[63] As it was, the incident enhanced Sunil Dutt’s stature as a renouncer (he had married an older woman, he had not insisted on his wife’s renunciation of her religious identity, he had nursed her devotedly in her illness, and he had permitted a Muslim burial); but it also had the interesting effect of Islamicizing him, and of marking him out as the weak Hindu male, the most treacherous of the enemies within.

Sunil Dutt would come in time to be known, especially by the Hindu right, as a Muslim sympathizer. In 1993, when he was involved in providing relief to the victims of Bombay’s vicious anti-Muslim riots (in which the police participated), he was accused by the Shiv Sena (a Hindu rightist group based in western India and powerful in Bombay) of undue partiality to Muslims. There were, according to Dilip Kumar, two attempts on his life, and the family received death threats. Later that year, in April 1993, and then again four months later, his son Sanjay, who was one of the highest-paid leading men in the industry, was arrested and jailed for possession of a smuggled AK–46 and ammunition in the aftermath of bombings in Bombay which are now widely believed to implicate Muslim underworld figures with ties to Pakistan and Dubai. He was believed to have obtained these from a Muslim film-production duo, Hanif-Samir, who were arrested for gun running in the Bombay blast case. He was imprisoned briefly, then released on temporary bail, allowing him to wrap up work on a film, Khalnayak (directed by Subhash Ghai, 1993), which went on to become a great success; by a curious coincidence, he played the role of a notorious terrorist and political assassin in that film. As in the case of his mother with Mother India, he began to be identified in fairly literal ways with (what was retrospectively recognized as) an important role; newspapers and magazines began to describe the new breed of violent Hindi films as inseparable from the violence of their (criminal, Muslim) backers. Hindu rightist groups campaigned against his films and those of his father. Sanjay was rearrested under the notorious Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) and charged with conspiracy and sedition in the Bombay blast case, instead of being charged under the milder Arms Act. In October 1994 he was denied bail, on the grounds that (under TADA) the very possession of prohibited weapons constituted proof of terrorist intent.^[64]

The Hindu right saw in Sanjay the lineaments of his Muslim mother (and his “Muslim-loving” father). Nargis’s Muslimness, then, was never fully exorcised from the star legend; but the subtext that was more or less curbed in her lifetime was to take the form of an interesting displacement. She continues in some registers to be revered as a legend, with Doordarshan recently holding a retrospective of her films, but she also figures at the same time as a species of monstrous mother, as her husband and her son come to occupy the place of her Otherness. The fact that Sanjay was a spoiled and recklessly self-indulgent young man, who had been his mother’s darling, has given for some people a certain credence to the substitution. The fact, moreover, of his visibility and popularity—he was the second only to Amitabh among male stars in Bombay—is fully congruous with the sense of the Muslim as the familiar enemy; thus the Muslim is not one of us, and the Muslim is, terrifyingly, one of us.

The scenario of the overfond mother whose indulgence (temporarily) spoils the son is a common one in the Bombay cinema, and in the eyes of many it seems to have been played out with uncanny literalism in the Nargis-Sanjay Dutt story. She is known to have been passionately fond of him, indulging him and lying for him in defiance of her husband’s call for stricter discipline, and she is believed by many to have facilitated his addiction to a variety of drugs, including heroin. I should point out that even outside the context of the charges he currently faces, Sanjay is conspicuous as his mother’s son. His audiences, it is said, see him as carrying an aura of tragedy and vulnerability because of his mother’s early death, an aura that belies the macho violence of his roles.^[65] But the very prematurity of her death is also the sign of a refusal to die; she features as a contagion from beyond the grave, an unquiet specter inhabiting both the renegade Hindu husband and the violent, weak minded, and affectionate son. In this context, Sanjay’s long and very public history of addiction makes him available as an easily pathologizable figure. The fact of his describing himself as always vulnerable to temptation (“It’s a sickness that can’t be cured”) provides a rationalization for the stigmatization.^[66] His addiction functions as an analog to, and perhaps the support for, the taint of his Muslimness.

It must be noted that, apart from the prosecutors and the Hindu right, he is believed to be innocent of the conspiracy charges, though he is believed to have had mob connections. An article in the respected fortnightly India Today also links the acquisition of the weapon to questions of religious identity. It conjectures that the frantic calls for help the Dutts received from besieged Muslims during the riots may have led Sanjay to this step, especially as the Hanif-Samir team began to frequent his home at this juncture.^[67] He has become, unwittingly, a representative figure, not only of the enemy within but also of an entire industry’s alleged subservience to Muslim mafiosi based in Dubai. The very word Dubai resonates powerfully in the Indian context, given the numbers of Muslim Indians who have gone there (and to other countries in the Persian Gulf) in recent decades as guest workers and returned to India comparatively wealthy and occasionally with a sharpened sense of religious affiliation. This is articulated in ways both subtle and obvious with the growing sense of Bollywood’s thralldom to organized crime, especially Muslim organized crime; the trips made by famous major and minor stars to Dubai, and their reputed liaisons with alleged underworld figures, are seen as evidence of their subjection to these illicit, antinational influences.^[68] Sanjay’s apprehension led to considerable nervousness in the industry, nervousness that sometimes took the form of appeasing Bal Thackeray, the head of the Shiv Sena. It also became the occasion for the imposition of a number of demands by the Hindu rightist Bharatiya Janata Party in Bombay on the Film Makers’ Combine: these included suspending producers and actors accused of antinational activities from trade bodies and new films and respecting “the Hindu way of life, culture and values.” ^[69]

And while his arrest has been instrumental in increasing criticism of TADA, I would argue that the very fact of his arrest and imprisonment without bail (along with hundreds of alleged coconspirators), despite his being the son of a Congress (I) member of Parliament, at a time when the party was in power at the state and at the federal level, is something of a testimony to the fact that suspicions of his Muslimness do not emanate solely from the Hindu right. TADA is in fact notorious for having been applied with extreme rigor to religious minorities, especially Muslims and Sikhs, and has been vociferously criticized by religious minorities and the Human Rights Commission. TADA does not clarify the nature of terrorist activity, encompassing acts violent and nonviolent, private and public, and places upon the accused the burden of proving their innocence;^[70] in this regard it functions in ways that are already familiar to religious minorities, casting them as the abjected who must compulsively yet unsuccessfully keep enacting their good citizenship. At the moment Sanjay is out on bail and has resumed his acting career, thanks to the intervention of Thackeray. This is not testimony to the waning of Hindu fundamentalist zeal. Rather, it speaks to the power of the RSS chief, who can manifest his potency perhaps even more persuasively by withholding punishment than by inflicting it.

This is a sequel, not yet completed, to the life of Nargis. Even after death, she remains, as good Muslimness remains in the Indian polity and in Indian/Hindu public culture, as a phantasm, a ghost that lives and moves uncannily in our midst, not quite tangible and never fully exorcisable. Her career—in life and after it—illustrates in fascinating ways how disturbing and enigmatic a figure of (gendered) trouble the good Muslim is for Indianness. (The “bad Muslim,” as a figure who insists on forms of religiously based separatism and retains the obvious signifiers of Muslim identity, is a far easier entity to respond to or manage.) As we have seen, the industry itself has showcased Muslim talent—in acting, direction, writing, and music—in a very substantial way; many Muslim actors and actresses have entered the imaginary of a movie-going public in the most spectacular ways. The good Muslim, then, is not simply a phobic object, to be responded to with punitive laws and pogroms and other forms of bigotry; s/he is also, and at the same time, the object of love and identification. Above all, s/he is a figure of unhappy intimacy who, despite manifold repressions and conversions, returns repeatedly and inauspiciously to haunt the wholeness of an Indian (Hindu) psyche/polity. (Post)colonial Hindu/Indian identity must simultaneously disavow and be consumed with the intimate enemies that it can scarcely distinguish from itself.

Notes